A CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Drive System Targeting Female Reproduction in the Malaria Mosquito vector Anopheles gambiae
By Andrew M. Hammond, R. Galizi, Kyros Kyrou, A. Simoni, C. Siniscalchi, D. Katsanos, Matthew Gribble, David Baker, Eric Marois, S. Russell and 4 more. Nature Biotechnology, 2015
1,053 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Gene drive systems that enable super-Mendelian inheritance of a transgene have the potential to modify insect populations over a timeframe of a few years. We describe CRISPR-Cas9 endonuclease constructs that function as gene drive systems in Anopheles gambiae, the main vector for malaria. We identified three genes (AGAP005958, AGAP011377 and AGAP007280) that confer a recessive female-sterility phenotype upon disruption, and inserted into each locus CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive constructs designed to target and edit each gene. For each targeted locus we observed a strong gene drive at the molecular level, with transmission rates to progeny of 91.4 to 99.6%. Population modeling and cage experiments indicate that a CRISPR-Cas9 construct targeting one of these loci, AGAP007280, meets the minimum requirement for a gene drive targeting female reproduction in an insect population. These findings could expedite the development of gene drives to suppress mosquito populations to levels that do not support malaria transmission.
Subfields: Insect Science, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd25e176c47d014baa61a4e8d64f2ae11cf49bc3
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Citations in the corpus
- Options for the biological and physical control of Vespa velutina nigrithorax (Hym.: Vespidae) in Europe: A review (2018, methodology): “Thanks to CRISPR/cas9 technology Hammond et al. have shown in 2016 that they can spread a recessive infertility gene in the Anopheles gambiae mosquito (Hammond et al., 2016).”
- The potential for the use of gene drives for pest control in New Zealand: a perspective (2018, methodology): “Rather than the approach used in mosquitos of trying to spread a gene drive that damages fecundity or fitness in a population (Gantz et al. 2015; Hammond et al. 2015), a gene drive system will fail if queens that are made defective do not spread their genetics.”
- Gene Drives on the Horizon: Advancing Science, Navigating Uncertainty, and Aligning Research with Public Values (2016, background): “For example, although empirical evidence indicates suggest that conversion rates for gene drives are high for specific wild-type alleles in the laboratory (Gantz and Bier, 2015; Gantz et al., 2015; Hammond et al., 2016), there are, as of yet, no estimates of gene drive conversion rates in larger and”